Erika was tortured by anxiety, an anxiety all the more distressing from the fact that she could not define her fears.
Towards her husband Emma displayed a daily increasing irritability. But his easy content was not at all disturbed by it. Thanks to a fancy which was ever ready to devise means for sparing and nourishing his self-conceit, he discovered a hundred reasons other than the true one for his wife's attitude towards him. Her irritability was all due, so he informed Miss Sophy, to her situation. And in receiving Miss Sophy's admiring and compassionate homage he found, and had found for some time, his favourite occupation.
Emma now lived apart in a large room, which, besides her bed and wash-stand, was furnished only with a couple of book-shelves, two straight-backed chairs covered with horsehair, and a round tiled stove decorated with a rude bas-relief of a train of mad Bacchantes and bearing on its level top a large funeral urn. The boards of the floor were bare, and in a deep window-recess there was an arm-chair. In this chair the miserable woman would sit for hours, her elbows resting upon its arms, her hands clasped, staring into vacancy.
In the garden upon which this window looked the snow lay several feet deep; upon the meadow beyond, which sloped gently to the broad frozen river, and upon its icy surface, it was so deep that meadow and river were undistinguishable from each other; upon the dark pine forest that bounded the horizon--upon everything--it lay cold and heavy. All cold!--all white! Huge drifts of snow; no road definable; never a bird that chirped, never a leaf that stirred; all cold and white, without pulsation, without breath, dead,--the whole earth a lovely stark corpse.
And the wretched woman's gaze could fall upon naught outside save this white monotony.
Spring came. The dignified repose of death dissolved in feverish activity, in the restless change of seasons, vibrating between fair and foul, between purity and its opposite.
The earth absorbed the snow, except where in dark hollows it lingered in patches, to disappear slowly in muddy pools.
Emma still sat for hours daily in her room with hands clasped in her lap, but her eyes were no longer fixed on vacancy; they had found an object upon which to rest. Among the tender green of the meadows so lately stripped of their snowy covering, glided the river, dark and swollen. How loudly it exulted in its liberation from its icy fetters! "Freedom!" shouted its surging waves,--"Freedom!"
Upon this river her gaze was now riveted.
Days passed,--weeks; the air was warm and sweet; the window by which she sat was open, and the voice of the river was clear and loud.